No, it isn’t the one I am thinking about. Though I should schedule a Foster reread after I get finished with the current Co-Dominion series.
The most recent is the book The Strain by Hogan/Del Toro. It’s essentially a generic zombie story, except they substitute vampires for zombies. Same deal with an infection spreading, impossibly rapid biological changes, the dead walk, panic ensues, a nd so on, but rather than the original brains-eating or more current flesh-eating walking dead, these want blood. More annoying, the characters are straight from Central Casting - total cardboard, they could be from any horror film made in the last 50 years. Yes, a spouse welcomes back a dead SO and begins feeding it, and yes, a grieving parent attempts to care for a dead child and is attacked and killed by it.
Jonathan Nasaw is not a hugely popular novelist. But in 1996, he wrote a vampire novel, The World on Blood, and it became his best-selling work. So he wrote a sequel Shadows in 1998.
But Shadows somehow seemed off. The characters from the first book all seems to have been shuffled around; secondary characters were now the main characters, main characters dropped into the background, old characters got put on the bus, new characters popped in from nowhere, and established characters acted differently then they had in the first book. And the plot had only a minimal connection to the first book.
So while I have no evidence outside of the book itself, I suspect that Shadows had not originally been written as a sequel to The World on Blood. I think Nasaw had already been planning it out as a stand-alone novel with its own characters but when The World on Blood began selling so well, he rewrote Shadows into a sequel by squeezing the characters from the first book into the roles of the second.
Not quite the same league, but… Conan Doyle had killed off his character Sherlock Holmes in 1893 in the short story “The Final Problem,” because he was tired of writing detective stories. Seven years later, he was trying to put together a novel based on a legend about a hellhound and a county squire; he had made considerable progress on the novel, when he decided he needed a detective and so brought back Holmes. It wasn’t until two or three years after Hound of the Baskervilles that he actually brought back Holmes in “The Adventure of the Empty House.”
People should use “and Bob’s your uncle” more.
Not sure if it fits into this category, but I’ve remarked for years that the original movie Total Recall exhausts the Philip K. Dick story it’s nominally based on (We Can Remember it for you Wholesale*) in the first 20 minutes or so. The rest of the film was cobbled together from bits from elsewhere, and I’ve made the case many times before that a huge chunk of it appears to be lifted from Robert Sheckley’s novel The Status Civilization, which features
– a hero who’s lost his memory
– who goes to another world
– where people are coming after him with guns to try to kill him
– who eventually learns about his past from deformed Mutants who live in their own sector in the main city on the planet, who have psychic abilities
– and it turns out that the person responsible for putting him in this situation is – himself!
– so present, mind-wiped Hero sorta defeats past prior Hero in his Head and avoids going crazy. Or does go crazy. Your choice.
There’s also a bit of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars at the end, with the whole Atmosphere Plant Getting Turned on by the Hero in his possibly dying moments.
Sheckley, as I’ve remarked, has got to be the most sinned-against sf/fantasy author when it comes to movies. The films nominally adaopted from his books and stories have been awful and radically changed (Freejack, The Tenth Victim, Condorman, * the “Watchbird” episode of Masters of Science Fiction), but on the other hand, other films appear to have ripped off his idea without attribution. The Running Man bears more than a passing resemblance to “The Prize of Peril” – which had actually been adapted I France , before the Stephen Kibng novel came out). Lots of people have remarked on the similarities between [I}The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Sheckley’s Dimension of Miracles (Galaxy-wandering Earthman at the mercy of ironic, satirical extraterrestrials who are incompetent bureaucrats, trying to get home or someplace like it, and who meets , among others, the world-building aliens who constructed the Earth). And the above description of Total Recall/Status Civilization.
*The Dick story isn’t about the sort of Matrix/Inception fantasy world the movie depicts, but about memories, which I admit would’ve made for a dull film. More telling is the fact that the hero in Dick’s story is kind of a nebbish. it’s been suggested that he’s more of a Woody Allen type, definitely not an Arnold Schwartzenegger hero.
The same is true about the movie Logan’s Run. You can see some of it is derived from the novel by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. But there’s a lot of stuff in the movie that never happened in the book.
But the stuff in the movie that isn’t in the book is very similar to the plot of the movie Glen and Randa, which was a relatively obscure SF movie made five years earlier.
You have to love any movie that was produced by Brownian motion.
Does 50 Shades of Grey count, given that it was originally conceived as a Twilight fan fic?
I can see how it might, as it is one thing (Twilight fanfic) which has been disguised as another (an original story). However, there’s already a well-established meme for that, Ascended Fanfic. I was surprised at how many “original” works started out as fanfic. Except of course that fanfic is the beginning for many writers, so it’s perhaps not so amazing that their talent leads to ascending their fanficishness … which probably does fit under broader the rubric of budgie jobs. But Ascended Fanfic is very much spot-on, a much more accurate term.
<tinfoil hat>Maybe that’s why Disney REALLY bought Lucasfilm… to keep their mouths shut about the connection.</tinfoil hat>
The OP references the supposed original meaning of “budgie job” as making one animal look like another. I remember reading that when they made The Poseidon Adventure, the special effects people taped little cardboard cutouts of people onto the backs of cockroaches and that’s what you see running around on the boat at one point. Or was it The Towering Inferno? It was one of the two.
I meant to post this originally, but in Tommy Boy, they go to a “fair” in Sandusky, Ohio, a town more famously known for the theme park of Cedar Point. When I saw this originally it seemed clear to me that they had written the film originally as the leads going to Cedar Point, but something fell through and they had to substitute a regional town carnival instead.
Stanislaus writes:
> Die Hard With A Vengeance was originally a non-John McLean script called Simon
> Says; it was turned into DHWAV because they wanted to make another Die Hard
> movie and it’s easier to adapt a good script than write a new one.
The entire Die Hard series was cobbled together from spare parts. All of the first four films were rewritten versions of scripts that originally had nothing to do with the series. The only one that was always intended to be a part of the series was the fifth movie, and that was the worst one according to most people: